For all her brilliance, Natalia Osipova's much-anticipated début in Frederick
Ashton's rustic rom-com was something of a curate's egg, says Mark Monahan

The ongoing fascination with Natalia Osipova lies not just in her brilliance, though brilliant she certainly is. Put simply, she defies gravity more completely and more serenely than any other ballerina I have ever seen, and yet, as an interpreter, the former Bolshoi star has so far proved – since joining the Royal Ballet in 2013 – an interpreter of wild unpredictability. (Her Giselle, for example, is magical, unimprovable; her more recent Manon was comfortably bettered by several others’.)

On Thursday evening, she made her much-anticipated début as Lise, plucky heroine of Frederick Ashton’s matchless rustic rom-com La Fille mal gardée (1960), in what turns out to be a curate’s egg of a reading. Technically, she is often astounding. Her enamoured villager seems barely heavier than the ribbons that sweetly recur throughout the work: she fires off explosive jetés; bourrées like a dream; leaps onto her beau’s shoulder as blithely as if stepping on to the kerb.

But her bearing feels more Russian than English – she could perhaps learn a thing or two here from her eight superbly drilled, beautifully Ashtonian Friends – and the all-important humour of the piece often eludes her. Also, it is she, I think, who is responsible for a shortage of intimacy between her Lise and Steven McRae’s Colas until the latter stages of the piece. (Last week’s first-night couple, Laura Morera and Vadim Muntagirov, were an odder couple on paper but in fact both funnier and more moving.)

Enamoured: Osipova in full flow (Image: Tristram Kenton)

For McRae’s Colas, though occasionally a touch flashy, is wonderful. Like Osipova, he is a particularly virtuosic “aerial” dancer – his astonishing box-splits in the bottle dance a case in point. But there is a particularly Ashtonian quality about his physical articulation here (especially his sublime footwork), as well as a playfulness that is just right. Witness his charming disappointment both near the start when Lise fails entirely to spot one spectacular jump of his, and when the new arrivals in the cornfield turn out not to be Lise and co, but Ashton’s five implausibly huge chickens.

On which subject, Michael Stojko is a super Cockerel – less entertaining is Philip Mosley as Lise’s mother, Widow Simone. Overplaying the comedy, and apparently unaware of the existence of the orchestra for much of the clog dance, he looks like a boxing-promoter in a frock and, sad to say, repeatedly evinces wistful, recent memories of Will Tuckett in the role.

The one lead performance that you wouldn’t want to change even infinitesimally is Paul Kay’s, as Lise’s simple-minded, would-be spouse, Alain. Kay once again pulls off the fiendishly difficult trick of being at once musical, maladroit, athletic, hilarious and (crucially) lovable – his double, tremulous ascent of the stairs at the climax is close to poetry – in a reading of the part that is an unalloyed pleasure throughout and now looks very close to definitive.